It Is Time for America to Make a Stand

Article by William Marshall in "Townhall":

We have had enough. American patriots have stood idly by while the International Left has swept through our culture like the Germans swept through France in 1914, burning and slaughtering in their relentless drive toward Paris. Passivity has been our most demonstrable quality as the icons of our history – Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant – have been attacked, small businesses destroyed, and innocent Americans assaulted and threatened. It is time to summon our manhood, just as the French did at the Battle of the Marne, finally saying, “Enough!” against an Imperial German army hell-bent on conquest.

History reminds us that antithetical forces vie in a never-ending human struggle for dominance. The forces of good advance and retreat. The forces of evil advance and retreat. We have been watching evil advance since May 25 under the guise of doing good. It is time for good to make a stand.

The study of history is so important. Sadly, from an early age, too many of us learned history in a mind-numbing way, without being told at the outset that we learn history because it serves a higher purpose - as a guide to human behavior now and in the future. Too often, children in history classes are simply taught to memorize by rote dates, names and places in a dry, detached way, without that history being applied as a tool to inform current events.

Many examples throughout history could be, and are, being employed by commentators to make sense of the insanity that is occurring across our country today, as the International Left sends its shock troops in a weird amalgam of Black Lives Matter activists and Antifa thugs to rampage, pillage, loot, vandalize, burn and murder. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of it all is the response, or lack of such, by appeasing corporations hoping to buy off the Mob, abetting Democratic municipal leaders offering little or no police response, flaccid “conservatives,” and a shocked and paralyzed populace of normal Americans who can’t comprehend what is happening to their beloved country.  

An historical precedent I would like to throw out is the situation in Europe at the beginning of World War I. The month of August 1914, as recounted so ably in the classic historical treatise by Barbara Tuchman, Guns of August, could serve as a lesson in how to address the insanity we are witnessing today.

In 1914 tensions were rising between Imperial Germany and its ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the one hand, and an alliance (the Entante) between England, France and Russia on the other. France and Germany had a fairly significant “past” – most recently in the war they fought in 1870. There was no love lost between them. By 1914, the fairly paranoid Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, was certain that the Allies were trying to encircle Germany.

England was alarmed because land-locked Germany had set about building capital warships, directly threatening England’s unrivalled supremacy of the seas. By August 1914 everyone was on a hair trigger. Belgium, the hapless neighbor of France and Germany, was considered by international agreement to be a neutral country, whose borders were inviolable. But Germany had been strategizing for years how to go about conquering France and many of its top generals were itching to do so. Their strategy, known as the Schlieffen Plan, called for a massive drive south into France through Belgium in an encircling movement around the French armies.

On August 4, German forces crossed into Belgium, setting off a new form of mechanized warfare that would eventually engulf half the world and result in incomprehensible carnage. Belgian troops fought valiantly but were no match for the German juggernaut. With due respect to my German ancestors, the one thing above all that Germans are exceedingly good at is foreign conquest. It’s in our blood.

But it is the reaction of the French forces that I would like to highlight as analogous to what I see happening in America today. The French were aware of Germany’s militaristic inclinations and had planned meticulously for potential hostilities with Germany. And the French at that time were considered capable warriors in their own right (perhaps living off their salad days under Napoleon Bonaparte’s leadership). But as German forces crossed into France, the French armies fell back, and fell back, and fell back. There appeared to be little effective resistance, or leadership, on the part of the French military.

As German forces drove deeper into France, the very heart of France – and what many would consider the heart of the civilized world, Paris - was threatened. Such a state of affairs shocked the French people, not to mention the rest of Europe and the larger world. A paralysis seemed to have taken hold of the French people and their military.

As the French Fifth Army, which took the brunt of the German drive fell back on the Marne River, just fifty miles north of Paris, one man, General Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the Military Governor of Paris, said, “Enough!” The old, revered veteran who had been called out of retirement in his 60s to defend the French capital, saw an opportunity to make a stand against the German monolith and attack an exposed German Army on its flank.

In a remarkable turnabout, Gallieni rallied the French Fifth and Sixth Armies, convinced the British Expeditionary Force to fight alongside them, and infused his troops with the spirit – the elan - to give everything in the cause of saving Paris and defeating the Hun menace. They turned the Germans back in what came to be known as the “Miracle of the Marne.” The German forces retreated and the Allied and Axis powers settled into a bloody, four-year long stalemate which, with American help, would see the defeat of the German Empire and the salvation of Europe.

We need a General Gallieni in America today to say, “Enough!” America is a great and good country, with a proud and noble history. It is a history of tremendous sacrifice for peoples all over the world. It is time to stop apologizing for an institution in our culture that we fought a war costing over 600,000 American lives to end over 150 years ago.

Clearly most of those now engaged in the cultural assault, physical destruction, and intimidation in America today only care about one thing – the destruction of America, because they hate it. Pure and simple.

As we celebrate this Independence Day, it is time for all Americans of every stripe – black, white, Asian, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Democrat, Republican – to make a stand and say, “Enough!”

https://townhall.com/columnists/williammarshall/2020/07/02/it-is-time-for-america-to-make-a-stand-n2571744